I had to laugh when I ran across this Rage Comic this morning by Reddit user Sumurika. How many times have you collected some valuable fruit or fish, only to discover that your Sim has cooked and eaten it when you weren't paying attention?

 

At a basic level, this happens because of the game's logic for choosing food ingredients. Your Sim will choose the best ingredients available when they make a meal. If your Sim happens to have two grapes, a tomato, and a Flame Fruit in their inventory, then guess what they are going to make into pancakes? Yep: say goodbye to that Flame Fruit!

We have pretty solid information that the developers at EA have started working on The Sims 4. Although it will most likely be a long while (perhaps several years) before the game hits the shelves, there is still plenty to talk about in the mean time.

 

A two minute promo (really more of a demo real) for Sims 4 was leaked a few months ago. It seems to be legit, and in fact EA has had it taken down from YouTube - but it still exists here and there on various fan sites. 

 

My first thought on seeing the promo was, "I'm going to need a better computer." Which is both funny and sad, because the entire reason I bought this computer - this one right here that I'm using to write this article - was because I needed a better computer so that I could play The Sims 3. Can it be time to buy a new computer already? (All signs point to "Yes." My current computer has to stop to render things when I switch to a new lot. I shudder to think what would happen if it tried to churn through all the animations showed in the video.)

If you have been playing the Sims franchise of games for very long (I started in February, 2000) you get a feel for how they work. Having played Sims Freeplay for a few weeks, here are some of my more in-depth reactions to some of the odder bits of the game.

 

Sims Freeplay is frequently compared to a Tamagotchi, and the comparison is apt. If you leave your little Sims or simply neglect their needs for too long, bad things happen. They have zero free will. Left to their own devices, they will simply stand right where you last put them, stinking, starving, exhausted, and having to pee. They won't lift a finger to help themselves, which can feel frustrating to an experienced Simmer.

Regardless of where you fall on the piracy continuum, one thing is very clear: EA hates it. Right or wrong (and I know people who will argue either way) EA is convinced that it is losing millions of dollars of revenue per year to piracy of its flagship game, The Sims 3. And when a company is convinced that it is losing millions of dollars of revenue per year, it fights back.

 

EA has tried a lot of different anti-piracy measures in the past. SecureROM proved to be a major debacle, one of the few instances of gamer news that broke through to the mainstream media. Spore was originally going to ship with SecureROM, and it was originally going to be inextricably tied to one specific computer. Buy a new computer? Too bad - you have to buy a new copy of Spore, too.

The biggest frustration with trying to play Sims Freeplay on an iPad is just figuring out how things work. There appears to be one single (poorly spaced) help document that - as is so often the case - isn't nearly helpful enough.

 

One project I recently undertook was to figure out the deal with the little cloud icon. If you go to the main menu (click the three white dots on a green background at the bottom center of your screen), the middle right-hand option is a cloud. Why? What is the cloud for?